Bruckner Symphony No. 4 – Welser-Möst

Bruckner has a way of exposing exactly how much anyone involved in a release actually believes in what he’s doing, and Franz Welser-Möst — a director I’ve spent thirty years alternately admiring and arguing with — believes in this score down to his fingertips. Whether you’ll agree with everything he and his editor have decided to do with it is another matter entirely.

Let’s get the thorny part out of the way first, because Arthaus certainly doesn’t shy from it: this is the Korstvedt edition of the 1888 version, not the Haas or the Nowak that generations of us grew up trusting as gospel. Benjamin Korstvedt is a serious scholar, and his research into the layered revisions Bruckner made under pressure from well-meaning colleagues — Franz Schalk chief among them, forever tinkering, forever “improving” — deserves respect. But respect is not the same as comfort. Those horn calls in the scherzo, the ones that used to detonate with such thrilling inevitability the first time through, arrive truncated here. The reprise feels clipped, almost apologetic. And there are cymbal clashes in the finale that will startle anyone whose ear was formed by Klemperer’s granite-block Philharmonia recording, or Jochum’s glowing, unhurried Dresden account, or Karajan’s autumnal late remake with the Vienna Philharmonic — none of which admit percussion at those junctures at all.

Is it “wrong”? I hesitate to use that word about scholarship this careful. But it is disorienting, the way a familiar room looks wrong when someone’s moved the furniture two feet to the left. You keep reaching for a chair that isn’t there.

What redeems the enterprise — handsomely — is the playing.

The Cleveland Orchestra under Welser-Möst produces a sound of remarkable transparency for this repertoire, more Apollonian than Dionysian, closer in spirit to George Szell’s old discipline than to the incense-thick Bruckner sonority we associate with Vienna or Munich. The strings in the Andante, quasi allegretto sing with a burnished, almost chamber-music clarity — you can hear inner voices that get swallowed in murkier accounts. The horns, crucial in any “Romantic” symphony (Bruckner’s own subtitle, and for once a nickname that actually illuminates the music rather than merely decorating it), are superb: firm-grained, never blary, phrased with unusual sensitivity to the hunting-call ancestry of that opening theme emerging out of tremolo string mist.

Visually, Brian Large does what Brian Large always does, which is to say: he knows where the music lives and points his cameras there before you’ve even thought to ask. Wide shots of the string sections breathing together in the great adagio-paced crescendos, tight shots catching the exact instant a trumpet player draws breath before an entrance — this is direction by someone who has clearly conducted himself, or spent decades watching people who do. The visual side of things is a genuine pleasure, one that outstrips much of the DVD-generation Bruckner videography still floating around.

Sonically the Blu-ray transfer has real presence — detailed, warm, with the low string pizzicati in the scherzo trio popping with satisfying tactility. Fortissimos compress somewhat, as they almost always do when an engineer is asked to squeeze a Brucknerian dynamic range through a home theater system; the pianissimos, by contrast, have an almost embarrassing intimacy, you can hear rosin dust settling. This is a quibble, not a disqualification.

One thing I will not let pass without complaint: the continued, baffling habit of certain European labels of scattering unrelated musical excerpts over their menu screens. It happens here too. Bruckner is not incidental music. He is not mood-setting for a shopping experience. To have fragments of this symphony’s own material looping under a menu, arbitrarily sliced and repeating, before you’ve settled into your chair, is a small violation of the composer’s entire aesthetic — one built, famously, on patience, on architecture, on the long game. Bruckner asks you to wait for things. Don’t undercut that on page one.

Where does this leave the collector? Not as a first choice — Jochum’s poetic sweep, or Karajan’s granite-and-gold 1988 Vienna account, or even Günter Wand’s spacious clarity with the Berlin Philharmonic, remain the safer, more deeply grooved recommendations for anyone new to this symphony. But for listeners who already know the piece intimately, who’ve lived with Haas and Nowak long enough to have opinions about which climax should hit where, this Cleveland rendition is genuinely worth encountering — not despite its editorial peculiarities but partly because of them. It forces you to listen again, freshly, to a symphony you thought you’d long since memorized. That’s not nothing. Bruckner, of all composers, rewards being heard with open ears rather than settled expectations.

Recommended, then — with eyes open, and reservations noted in ink rather than pencil.